Playing Dirty With Air

The drama continues to build at Sunlaw Energy Corp., the little company in Vernon that wants to clean up our air but can’t.

Can’t, that is, because the Air Quality Management District won’t let it.

When I first wrote about Sunlaw earlier this year, it was trying in vain to get our once-vaunted air pollution agency to recognize the company’s breakthrough in cleaning the filth from power plants.

Smog and its cures, of course, have always been a magnet for charlatans. But the people at Sunlaw are no charlatans. They submitted boxes of independent tests to the AQMD showing that their power plant, using the company’s new equipment, produced about one-third the pollutants of even the cleanest competing plants.

This dramatic improvement matters very much, incidentally, because California sits at the cusp of a new age in power generation. The huge, old boiler plants of yore have grown obsolete and soon will be replaced by a new breed of turbine-driven plants. Already, energy companies are prowling Southern California, picking out sites for the new plants.

So the question posed is this: Will these plants receive the benefit of Sunlaw’s new technology or will they use the old equipment that releases three times as many pollutants?

This spring, the AQMD revealed itself to be paralyzed in the face of this question. Its technology assessment program had failed to approve, reject or otherwise respond to Sunlaw’s discoveries after years of entreaties by the company.

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The AQMD said its paralysis was produced by a new state law, sponsored by the big polluters, that saddled the evaluation process with byzantine regulations. It was trapped, the AQMD said, by the bad guys.

Now comes the new twist in the road. It seems the federal Environmental Protection Agency caught wind of the Sunlaw discovery. Intrigued by its potential, the EPA asked the company for the same tests it had provided to the AQMD.

And this month the federal assessment came back. Voila! The EPA certified the Sunlaw plant as establishing a new standard for emission rates from power plants.

“I would like to congratulate you on the impressive results you have achieved,” the EPA wrote to the company’s president, Robert Danziger. The letter declared that the results would bear the EPA’s designation as the “Lowest Achievable Emission Rate.”

For what it’s worth, the NOx emissions at the Sunlaw plant were certified at 3.5 parts per million. Currently the AQMD standard is 9 parts per million.

More interesting yet, the EPA noted that in the last month of the test, the Sunlaw plant achieved a NOx emission rate of 1 part per million. That’s a pollutant level lower than the air we breathe on a smoggy day.

In any case, the much-maligned EPA managed to respond to the Sunlaw development in a matter of a few months. And its action has great meaning. As the EPA states in the letter, “the [federal] Clean Air Act requires that all new major sources . . . must comply with the lowest achievable emission rate.”

In other words, the Sunlaw emission rate is now the standard in Southern California and will apply to the new generation of power plants coming down the pike.

Or will it?

No, not quite, says the AQMD. Anupom Ganguli, chief of Stationary Source Compliance at AQMD, says the agency will still require Sunlaw to jump through the many regulatory hoops of the state law.

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“We still must have 12 months of emission data from Sunlaw,” says Ganguli. “Following that we will hold a public workshop. Then we will hold a public hearing at our governing board meeting.”

When will that process end? No one knows. The law sets no limit on the dithering and delays that can be imposed on anyone who wants to clean the air.

As Gail Ruderman Feuer of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, puts it: “The AQMD is choosing to make the public a loser. A cleaner technology is available and the AQMD has become the obstacle.”

It amounts to an amazing switcheroo from only 10 years or so ago when the AQMD led the world in promoting clean air. Now it finds itself being dragged by others, kicking and screaming all the way.

And there’s the small question of whether the AQMD is violating federal law by refusing to adhere to standards set by the EPA. When I put this question to the agency, the answer was ambiguous.

“We are talking to the EPA, trying to find a compromise,” said a spokesman.

Hey, I have an idea. Why not just call Sunlaw and ask the company to run its plant a little dirtier so all the other plants could run dirty too.

True enough, that’s not really a compromise. But then the AQMD is not really an air pollution agency. So it all fits rather nicely.